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Management Team

Tasktop has assembled a leadership team that combines excellence in technical leadership and extensive technology company management experience.

Mik Kersten

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder

Dr. Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop Technologies, creator and leader of the Eclipse Mylyn open source project, and inventor of the task-focused interface. His goal is to create the collaborative infrastructure to connect knowledge workers in the new world of software delivery. At Tasktop, Mik drives Tasktop’s strategic direction, key partnerships, and culture of customer-focused innovation. Prior to Tasktop, Mik launched a series of open source tools that changed the way software developers collaborate. As a research scientist at Xerox PARC, he created the first aspect-oriented development tools for AspectJ. He then created the task-focused interface during his PhD thesis and validated it with the release of Mylyn, now downloaded 2 million times per month. Building on the success of Mylyn, Mik created the Tasktop Dev and Sync product lines.

Mik's ideas on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and focus on individual knowledge worker needs make him a popular keynote speaker; he has been recognized with awards such as the JavaOne Rock Star and the IBM developerWorks Java top 10 writers of the decade. Mik's entrepreneurial contributions have been acknowledged by the 2012 Business in Vancouver 40 under 40, and as a World Technology Awards finalist in the IT Software category. Building on his contributions as one of the most prolific committers to Eclipse, he serves on the Eclipse Foundation's Board of Directors and web service standards bodies.

Neelan Choksi

President and Chief Operating Officer

Neelan oversees sales, solutions, marketing, finance, and business development, and helps Tasktop get its innovations to those who need them most. He is also a mentor at Capital Factory, an Austin-based incubator, and serves as a trustee at TechGirlz, a non-profit working to get adolescent girls excited about technology.

Neelan has extensive technology management experience and recently served as the chief operating officer of Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, which became the most popular e-book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Lexcycle was acquired by Amazon in 2009. Previously, Neelan served as COO of SpringSource, the venture backed open source infrastructure software company behind the Spring Framework. SpringSource was acquired by VMware in 2009. Before that, Neelan served as co-founder and president of SolarMetric, a leading object/relational mapping provider, which was acquired by BEA Systems in 2005. At BEA, he was instrumental in the open sourcing of the acclaimed object/relational mapping tool Kodo as OpenJPA. Neelan has also worked for Andersen Consulting Strategic Services and Exxon Research & Engineering.

Neelan is a graduate of MIT (and was part of the well-publicized MIT Blackjack team) and holds graduate degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Latest from Neelan:

David West

Chief Product Officer

Dave engages with customers and partners to drive Tasktop's product roadmap and market positioning, and plays a major role in building Tasktop into a transformative business driving major improvements in the software industry. As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including Agile and Lean methodologies, process improvement, and project and requirements management.

He is a frequent keynote speaker at major industry conferences, a widely published author of articles and research reports, and author of an acclaimed book, Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, which helped define new software modeling and application development processes. West's experience includes traditional and object-oriented development for enterprise applications and executive consulting, and he has implemented new development processes and tools for IT organizations in Europe and North America. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational, and managed the development of IBM solutions to support efficiencies in the financial services, product development and government industry sectors.

After IBM/Rational, West managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. He also served as vice president, research director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organizations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance major Agile-based methodology breakthroughs in the enterprise. West holds a B.A. in computing and business from Huddersfield University in the UK and a M.Sc. in computer science from Southbank University (UK).

Latest from David:

Simon Bodymore

Chief Financial Officer

Simon is responsible for financial strategy as well as overseeing Tasktop’s operational budget and managing our operations and finance teams. His organization includes Tasktop’s finance department, legal staff, human resources department, administration group and IT operations.

Prior to joining Tasktop, Simon served as CFO for Wurldtech Security Technologies, a company focused on protecting critical infrastructure from cyber attack, which was recently acquired by GE. He also held the positions of CFO for PNI Digital Media and Senior Manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Simon is a Fellow member of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (FCCA) in the United Kingdom.

Gail Murphy

Chief Scientist and Co-Founder

Dr. Murphy is a leading researcher on software evolution and tools. She brings to Tasktop extensive experience as a software developer and principal investigator of a large research group. In recognition of her research, Gail has been a keynote speaker at several software engineering conferences. She has received international awards, such as the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, a University of Washington College of Engineering Diamond Award, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist award. Her national awards include the NSERC Steacie fellowship.

At the University of British Columbia, Gail is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, where she works on human-oriented software development tools to make software developers more efficient and effective, and associate dean (Research & Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science.

Latest from Gail:

Betty Zakheim

Vice President, Marketing

Betty is responsible for all aspects of strategic marketing and lead generation activities. She brings to this role an extensive background in software integration technologies and software development tools.

Previously, Betty served as vice president of marketing for CopperEye (a UK-based, VC-backed software company) and InConcert (a Xerox New Enterprise Company), and VP of product strategy at SmartBear. She has also been director of marketing or product manager at Progress Software, IBM/Rational Software, IONA Technologies and Lightbridge. Betty founded and ran her own consulting firm, Outside In Solutions, where she counseled software companies on go-to-market strategies. Earlier in her career, she served in very technical roles as an engineer, UX developer, engineering manager, and in technical consulting positions.

Betty holds undergraduate degrees in Psychology, Advertising (from the S.I. Newhouse College of Public Communications) and is a Tau Beta Pi scholar in Computer Engineering. She also received a Master of Computer Science degree from Boston University.

Latest from Betty:

David Green

Vice President, Architecture

David was a founding member of MAKE Technologies, where he held the positions of CTO, vice president of technology and principal tools architect. At MAKE, David pioneered a model-driven approach to legacy modernization on the Eclipse platform, integrating business requirements, semantic code generation and data transformation. David is an Eclipse committer, and creator of Mylyn WikiText, a framework and tools for integrating wiki formatting into the Eclipse platform. He is well known for his widely read blog, Green's Opinion, apps for iPhone and Android, and speaking engagements at conferences such as JavaOne and EclipseCon.

Latest from David :

Nicole Bryan

Vice President, Product Management

Nicole has extensive experience in software and product development, focused primarily on bringing data visualization and human considerations to the forefront of Application Lifecycle Management. Most recently, she served as director of product management at Borland Software/Micro Focus, where she was responsible for creating a new Agile development management tool. Prior to Borland, she was a director at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Regulatory Division, where she managed some of the first Agile project teams at the NYSE, and VP of engineering at OneHarbor (purchased by National City Investments). Nicole holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from DePaul University. She is passionate about improving how software is created and delivered – making the experience enjoyable, fun and yes, even delightful.

Latest from Nicole:

Lance Knight

Vice President, Customer Success

Lance engages with customers and partners while leading Tasktop's technical sales engineering, customer training and customer support teams. Previously, he was senior director of global solutions consulting at Accept Corporation. He has also held senior solutions and sales engineering roles at Epicor and Calico, and founded Knivis, an internet marketing solutions provider. Lance is a certified ScrumMaster, scrum professional and spin selling coach. In his spare time, he serves on the district executive committee of the Boy Scouts of America, where he concentrates on adult leadership training.